In certain procurement transactions, sellers such as high-tech contract manufacturers or electronics vendors receive Purchase Orders (POs) or Requests For Quotation (RFQs), often involving Bills Of Materials (BOMs), from customers. Typically, in such transactions, the item numbers for the parts in the PO or RFQ are based on the part numbering scheme of the customer. Consequently, in order to process a customer's PO or RFQ, a seller may first need to convert each of the customer part numbers to a corresponding internal part number based on the seller's own, internal part numbering scheme.
For example, FIG. 1 illustrates how a customer part number 10 for an item can be mapped to a number of different manufacturer part numbers 12, 14, 16 for the same item. For the seller to convert the customer part number 10 to an internal part number for that item, the seller creates a new part number that has a one-to-one correspondence to the customer part number 10 for that item. FIG. 2 illustrates such an approach, in which the seller has created a new internal part number 18 that corresponds directly to the customer part number 10 for the item.
However, certain problems may exist with an approach such as that shown in FIG. 2. For example, since the seller's internal part number 18 is uniquely derived for the particular customer part number 10, that internal part number 18 is not readily associated with any of the seller's other internal part numbers for the item. In other words, internal part number 18 is not effectively tied back to the data in the seller's other internal systems. For example, the approach illustrated by FIG. 2 limits the seller's ability to determine whether the customer part number 10 is associated with one or more internal part numbers in any of the seller's existing contracts unless, for example, the seller goes through a manual exercise of matching the internal part numbers in its contracts to the new internal part number 18. As a result, the mapping approach illustrated by FIG. 2 does not allow a seller to effectively utilize its internal part numbers to aggregate material purchase volumes in order to formulate more accurate item prices using known leveraged volume aggregation techniques. Furthermore, the one-to-one mapping approach illustrated by FIG. 2 results in part number proliferation, and the resulting quantity of internal part numbers becomes exceedingly complex and costly for a seller to manage and maintain, due to the fact that a new internal part number must be created for every customer part number.